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3 US professors win Nobel Prize in Economics

Three American college professors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics Monday morning for their work on asset pricing.

Eugene Fama and Lars Hansen, both of the University of Chicago, and Robert Shiller of Yale took the top prize for work that “laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the honor, said in a statement.

The work of the three winners was done independently, rather than collaboratively.

The Economics honor is the last of the six annual $1.2 million prizes awarded by various Nobel committees for 2013.

Fama, 74, was honored for his work showing the difficulty of predicting asset prices in the short term; Hansen, 60, won for development of a statistical method for testing asset price movement; and Shiller was cited for his work in showing that stock prices show greater predictability in the long run.

“The Laureates have laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices. It relies in part on fluctuations in risk and risk attitudes, and in part on behavioral biases and market frictions,” the prize committee noted.